From Wall Street to Green Mountain

By

Eileen Gunn

Updated May 6, 2009 11:59 p.m. ET

What do you do when the career you thought you wanted turns out to be a bad fit? For Michael Dupee, the answer was to ditch the high-flying Wall Street life and return to his roots in social responsibility.

After graduating from Boston College in 1991, Mr. Dupee joined Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, then a small, fast-growing company in Waterbury, Vt., in the purchasing department. On the side, he headed an environmental committee that wrote a mission statement for the company, expanded a small recycling program and helped to reduce packaging on some Green Mountain products.

But in 1996, in need of a challenge and a boost to his business skills, Mr. Dupee enrolled in a joint MBA/JD program at Georgetown University. "Everyone at Green Mountain thought I'd take my law degree and work for the ACLU," he says. Instead, he landed a job with the distressed-assets group at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

The group was responsible for searching distressed credit-card, small-business and mortgage debt for salvageable investments to buy and pool together. Initially, Mr. Dupee's excitement about living in New York, landing a coveted job and working on multimillion-dollar deals buoyed him. But over time, he says, he began to have doubts about his career path. "It felt like there was something I should be doing that I wasn't."

For a while he used his sizable paycheck to pursue distractions from his career. He bought tickets to Yankee games and rock concerts, took sailing lessons and skied in the winter. But, in late 2003, three years after joining Goldman, Mr. Dupee decided he needed to make a fundamental change. At work, his team was broken up and re-assigned. He wasn't sure the opportunities he wanted would exist going forward. Meanwhile, work-related stress prevented him from sleeping and he began to worry about his health.

Robert Koes, a fellow Wall Streeter and Mr. Dupee's then-roommate, wasn't surprised. "I think he wanted to prove that he could succeed [at a firm like Goldman], which he did, but he was never that into it," Mr. Koes says.

In early 2004, Mr. Dupee went home to Vermont to visit his parents and brought a copy of his r&eacute;sum&eacute; along. "I told myself I wasn't job hunting; I was just connecting with people in my network." A friend there suggested that Mr. Dupee get in touch with Robert Stiller, the founder and then chief executive of Green Mountain.

More Second Acts

Back in New York, sitting at a Goldman trading desk, Mr. Dupee got a call from Mr. Stiller, who told him about a position he wanted to create -- a corporate social-responsibility officer who would be the nexus for efforts, including fair-trade coffee, environmental programs and community activism. "This part of my brain that hadn't been tapped in eight years started to wake up," he says. "I hadn't talked to a dreamer, which is what [Mr. Stiller] is, in years, and it felt really good."

He took the offer, pay cut and all, and moved back to Vermont. But he no longer works insane hours and now feels his work is in keeping with his values and interests.

It wasn't an entirely easy transition, as Mr. Dupee had to come up to speed on an emerging profession. That meant figuring out what sorts of efforts are realistic to accomplish, how to work with people in other parts of the business to get those things done and how to measure success. Even though he has returned to his roots, Mr. Dupee says his graduate degrees and prior experience have served him well. He says that in school and at Goldman, he learned how to navigate office politics, "speak the language of business" and to frame environmental or energy-saving initiatives in terms of savings and profits.

For his part, Mr. Koes isn't surprised that his friend feels at home in his new job. "At the end of the day, he could have gotten a degree in 17th-century French literature and ultimately would have found this same job," he says.

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